The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation Author : Victor Davis Hanson ISBN-13 : 978-1541673526 Publisher : Basic Books Guideline Price : £25 In an age laced with doom and gloom where civilisational collapse, be it from climate change , shrinking population (or overpopulation) or nuclear war, it might be salutary to look at other civilisations in history that have disappeared. Where Victor Davis Hanson’s How Everything Ends is different from similar books such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse is that Hanson is particularly concerned with civilisations that came to violent ends. The book’s subtitle, How Wars Descend into Annihilation, gives it the air of an airport bookshop tell-it-all, but The End of Everything excels first and foremost as a magisterial history of four cataclysmic military defeats, two from antiquity (Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes in 335 BCE and the Roman defeat of Carthage in the third Punic war two centuries later) and two from the premodern period (the Ottomans’ conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan to Cortés’s Spanish expedition in 1521).
Hanson, both a classicist and a military historian, lays out the historical context for each of the momentous sieges that led to four great civilisations being practically wiped off the face of the earth. The four cases share some similarities without being completely alike. Thebes – along with Corinth, Athens and Sparta, one of the fou.
